Paths Unknown
by GrandOldPenguin
Summary: The events of September 11, 2001, unfold and are observed from the penguins' perspective.


**A brief note:** Except for those who were very young at the time, most of us probably remember quite well how and where we first learned of the 9/11 attacks, regardless of where we were located in the world. The events touched many both directly and indirectly, especially those with ties to New York City. Although they are not real, the penguins as fictional characters were likely present in New York on September 11, 2001, and, as creatures with human-like organization, likely witnessed the day's events with some degree of understanding. _Paths Unknown_ tells the 9/11 story through their eyes.

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><p><em><strong>Tuesday, September 11, 2001<br>**__**8:55 a.m.**_

"Excellent work taking down those duckpin warriors, Private," Skipper praised his youngest soldier as ten small bowling pins with ninja faces drawn in black Sharpie lay on their sides atop the penguins' outdoor island. "I think you're finally ready to join the big boys and train with the full-size bowling pins starting tomorrow morning."

Private smiled. "Thanks, Skipper."

Kowalski waddled over to Private. "Well done," he said as he gave Private a congratulatory pat on the back. "You know, it feels like only yesterday when I, too, was first allowed to train with the ..."

Private didn't hear the rest as suddenly Kowalski's calm voice was overtaken by the deafening wail of sirens from multiple emergency vehicles speeding down the streets not far from the zoo. Once they let up, Kowalski turned to Skipper. "How many alarms do you think that one was?" he asked.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Skipper replied. "But whatever happened must be big."

Just then, the penguins spotted Alice a short distance away as she was making her morning rounds to deliver breakfast to the zoo's residents. To avoid arousing the suspicions of the zookeeper, Rico quickly cleared away the small bowling pins by swallowing them. As they had little flavor and even less nutrition, he couldn't wait to begin eating the _real_ food that Alice had in her wonderful metal bucket.

"Morning, birds," she said once she reached their enclosure. She tossed two handfuls of herring onto the island and then turned to walk away, but she stopped when the voice of a coworker suddenly came over her radio.

"Hey, Alice, you there?" a male voice asked.

Alice grabbed the radio out of her pocket. "I'm still on my feeding rounds," she replied. "Can it wait?"

"Just thought I should let you know about a terrible accident down at the World Trade Center," her coworker continued. "An airplane slammed into the North Tower. It's being covered on all the channels if you want to come see it on the TV here in the office."

"What floors did it hit?" Alice asked with a bit of worry in her voice.

"It hit pretty high. The affected floors are probably numbered somewhere in the nineties, I think. Why?"

"My brother works there," Alice replied as she began to make her way to the zoo office. "Thank God he's on the sixty-seventh floor."

"So that's what all the sirens were for," Kowalski said. "Should we see for ourselves what's happening on TV?"

Skipper nodded, and the four proceeded into the HQ, leaving their breakfast fish behind. It was around 9:00 when Skipper turned the TV on and the team sat down in front of it. "How sad," he said as he and the others watched the tower ablaze. "I wonder what could have caused it. Faulty instruments? A heart attack? Couldn't the copilot have done something?"

Mere minutes later, Skipper got his answer at the same time the rest of America did.

"Holy—" Kowalski exclaimed, his beak agape.

"No!" Rico shouted. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief.

"Skipper!" Private said worriedly as he clung to his leader.

"I'm sure that was intentional," Skipper turned to his team and said right after they had witnessed a jet strike the adjacent South Tower at 9:03. "America is under attack, boys. We've just witnessed history."

Private let go of Skipper and shook a flipper at the TV. "It doesn't make any sense, Skipper! What kind of people crash planes into buildings, killing themselves and countless others?"

"Cowards, Private," Skipper said. "Terrorists desperate to prove some radical agenda, no doubt. But they've failed to prove anything in my eyes."

"Is there anything we can do, sir?" Kowalski asked.

"I'm afraid this situation is beyond our expertise," Skipper replied. "We'd just get in the way. I think the best thing we can do is pray that we've seen the worst of it, and for all the passengers who will never reach their flight's destination and the office workers who won't be going home tonight."

As the penguins continued to watch the coverage of the sudden attack on their city, they began to hear various Channel 1 personalities and guests speculate about who might have been responsible for the plot to strike the towers. Some mentioned the February 1993 bombing in the parking garage below the North Tower, which claimed six lives.

As time went on, reports began to come in that a fire had broken out at the Pentagon, and live images from the scene were soon broadcast. Within minutes, Channel 1 began to report that a plane had been involved in this new incident as well.

Skipper shook his head in disgust. "These people are truly sick. At this point, I think every plane flying right now should be ordered to land before something else gets struck—God forbid it—but we're dealing with very determined, very warped people here."

Although he didn't know it at the time, just as Skipper was saying what he thought should happen, a SCATANA order was already being executed to ground all U.S. air traffic.

TV coverage soon switched back to live images of the Twin Towers ablaze in New York City. Minutes after, at 9:59, an unthinkable and unimaginable horror was broadcast live to an already shaken nation. The penguins watched in shocked silence as the South Tower began to collapse, its iconic form quickly reduced to a cloud of dust and a heap of debris. Subsequently, the team began to feel a small amount of shaking beneath them, the seismic byproduct of steel and concrete crashing to the ground just a few miles away. Although they had been witnessing the events unfold on TV, actually feeling the vibrations made the attack all the more real.

Seconds later, after the reality of what had just occurred set in, Skipper was the first to break the silence when he aimed several of his stronger "angry words" toward those responsible. He stopped only when he noticed that Private was trembling uncontrollably.

"I got a chill a moment ago, Skipper," Private said.

"The whole country did, Private," Skipper replied as he put a flipper on Private's back to comfort him.

The young penguin began to tear up. "So many people just died. What if we're next?"

Kowalski put a flipper around Private as well. "I don't think that the terrorists care about the zoo, Private, or even know it exists. I think they only want to hurt the humans."

Rico mumbled a string of sad-sounding gibberish as he looked away from the TV screen and instead to the floor. While he was one to usually enjoy chaos and destruction, even he knew that killing innocents was wrong, and he truly felt ill at what he had just seen. He'd never even think of using his explosives or weapons in such a way—had he a moment alone with the truly wicked, however, that was a different story.

As Skipper continued to comfort Private, a horrible thought suddenly entered the leader's mind. "Kowalski, if one building just collapsed, what are the odds—"

"I can't possibly predict, but I'm afraid they'd be quite high," Kowalski replied, knowing where Skipper was going with his question. "Those still inside below the crash zone need to help each other any way they can so that as many as possible can make it out of there while there's still time."

"What about all the people above where the plane hit?" Private asked.

Kowalski sighed and shook his head. "I don't think there's going to be a way for them. I'm sorry."

And twenty-nine minutes after the fall of the South Tower, the nationwide fear that its sister structure would inevitably suffer the same fate sadly proved true. At 10:28, the North Tower of the World Trade Center began to collapse as well. The penguins then held on to each other as they prepared to experience the resulting vibrations yet again, the aftershock to an even more shocking reality.

"My God ... I cannot put this into words," they could hear Chuck Charles say on Channel 1. The penguins couldn't agree more.

Time passed slowly as the team continued to watch the morning's coverage. As time went on, the penguins learned of a United Airlines flight that had gone down earlier in western Pennsylvania and saw footage of men and women jumping to their deaths from high floors of the Trade Towers, which had been recorded before the towers collapsed.

After several hours of watching coverage of the aftermath and more replays of the second plane hitting and both buildings collapsing than they could count, the penguins decided to take a break around 3:00 p.m. to get some much-needed air on their island outside.

There, the team quickly noticed that the zoo was almost completely empty, and understandably so. The few humans who would occasionally stroll by were either adults wearing grim faces or their smiling children, who were too young to be anything but oblivious to the troubled and unsure world they would now be growing up in.

"I haven't seen you boys all day," the male zookeeper said when he came by a short time later. Although the herring Alice had given them earlier didn't appear to have been eaten, he tossed a few more onto the island. "Alice left early today to meet up with her brother, so it's just me here until closing. I have no idea why I'm telling you guys this—I suppose I'm just trying to clear my mind. It's been a hard day for this country. I wouldn't be surprised if the Statue of Liberty shed a few tears of her own. I know I did."

And with that, he walked away to tend to the animals of the next habitat.

Private looked at where the new fish had landed. "I don't think I have much of an appetite, Skipper."

"Neither do I," Skipper replied. A moment later, he broke away from the group and waddled to the end of the island and sat down on the edge. The other penguins watched as Skipper then buried his face in his flippers and began to cry softly to himself.

"I don't believe I've ever seen Skipper cry before," Private said.

"I think he was strong for as long as he could be, Private," Kowalski replied. "But for someone like Skipper to watch what he did today and be powerless to do anything about it, it can really take an emotional toll."

"Can we help him?" Private asked.

"Follow my lead," Kowalski said. "I think we can at least lift his spirits a little, as well as our own."

Kowalski waddled over to just behind where his leader was, placed a flipper over his heart, and began to sing:

"_God bless America,  
><em>_Land that I love.  
><em>_Stand beside her, and guide her  
><em>_Thru the night with a light from above._"

Skipper turned around and saw that Private and Rico were now behind him as well. He smiled slightly and then stood up beside them. Without a word, the team continued the song as a quartet.

"_From the mountains, to the prairies,  
><em>_To the oceans, white with foam,  
><em>_God bless America, my home sweet home.  
><em>_God bless America, my home sweet home!_"

"And I know He will," Skipper said. "Thanks, boys."

The team then stayed together on top of their island for the next several hours as they reflected on all that had unfolded that day. Sometimes this was accomplished through saying nothing at all and just by being together.

In the evening, the penguins returned to the HQ. They noticed soon after entering that they had left the TV on and learned from it that President Bush was about to address the nation.

"We now turn to our network to bring us the feed from the White House, where the president is set to deliver a short statement," Chuck Charles said to the audience of Channel 1.

"Good evening," Bush said as he sat behind his desk in the Oval Office. "Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices—secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers. Moms and dads. Friends and neighbors." He continued on for just under four minutes more, condemning the attacks, pledging to find those responsible, and asking for prayers for those affected.

Skipper turned the TV off moments after the commander-in-chief ended his address. "I think we ought to call it a night, boys," he said with a sigh. "Sleep will be a welcome escape tonight."

And with that, the four stood up and began to prepare themselves for bed. Minutes later, as Kowalski, Rico, and Private began to climb into their respective bunks, Skipper began to waddle away from them.

"Coming, Skipper?" Private asked as he looked at Skipper from his bunk.

"I'll be there in a moment, Private," Skipper replied. He then arrived at a shelf across the room and picked up a black rectangular object. After taking a moment to gather his thoughts, he depressed the red button on his tape recorder.

"_Skipper's Log, September 11, 2001: The blood of innocents was shed this morning when four American airliners were hijacked by terrorists and used as missiles. At least a few thousand dead. The boys and I witnessed many of the events together on live television here in the HQ. Though I have, of course, had my share of personal struggles and setbacks in life, and though I was not directly affected by any of the evil acts this morning, I am positive that today was the most significant day I have ever lived. Today marks the end of an era and the start of a new one, not just for me and my team, but for us as a nation. And so we set out on paths unknown._"

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><p><strong>Afterword:<strong> While I never struggled with the words, this story was still a bit of a challenge, as I had to balance keeping the characters in character, keeping the plot interesting, and treating the primary subject delicately and with necessary reverence all at the same time. Unlike other stories I've written, _Paths Unknown_ was never intended to be especially uplifting or suspenseful; rather, it was written as a historical piece encouraging remembrance. We all know that in the real world, no penguins witnessed the events of 9/11, nor lost loved ones in the attacks, nor experienced the simultaneous feelings of patriotism and uncertainty that followed. This story is instead dedicated to those who were affected and in memory of those taken from us ten years ago today.

—_GrandOldPenguin  
><em>September 11, 2011

[Story last revised June 6, 2013.]


End file.
